Tristram Hunt

How Eastleigh will show Labour is working

Labour is serious about winning in the south

Politics offers few greater pleasures than watching a by-election candidate self-immolate. Not a day goes by without Maria Hutchings, the Conservative party’s prospective MP for Eastleigh (so plainly hating the whole thing), tossing another match on the pyre of her electoral credibility.

But beyond the enjoyable barbarism of democracy, an important question is emerging from Eastleigh for the Labour party: how ready are we for government? Because if David Cameron cannot win in true blue Hampshire, on the back of a Liberal Democrat Cabinet minister perverting the course of justice, then he is well and truly stuffed.

When the Eastleigh by-election was called, there was a lazy Westminster debate about Labour’s job being to decide which coalition partner should win. Do we go in hard and let the Tories in; or hang back to let the Liberal Democrats keep the seat?

Rightly, Ed Miliband decided to fight to win with a high-profile candidate. John O’Farrell might be a comedian, but we are taking this by-election seriously, because if Labour is not interested in representing Eastleigh, then we have no governing project. ‘The party has to recover in the south for the sake of political principle, not just electoral advantage,’ wrote the Labour intellectuals Patrick Diamond and Giles Radice after the 2010 defeat left us with only ten seats out of 197 in southern England. ‘Labour should aspire to be a national party in every geographical and social constituency.’

This is as true of Eastleigh as it is of Stoke-on-Trent or Gateshead. Eastleigh is an everyday place: there is not a great deal of family money here, but a lot of regular concerns about squeezed budgets and public services. What is more, voters in Hampshire and the south do not have a foreign set of values to the heartlands of the Labour north.

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